How Erotica Can Be Great for Your Mental Health

Your heartbeat races. Your face flushes hot. Your breath quickens. Your muscles tense and twitch. You feel light-headed. The world suddenly seems terribly exciting or scary—maybe both. These are all signs of sexual arousal, but they can also be signs of a panic attack. And when a blogger who goes by Sarah Jane noticed this similarity last summer—at a time when jet lag from a recent trip was exacerbating her already-potent panic disorder—she turned to erotic novel The Boss, by Abigail Barnette.

Though she’s already read it several times, revisiting it again and again, she found, helped calm her down. “You can interrupt your stress or anxiety with something that produces a similar physical response, like increased heart rate, but also provides you with more positive feelings,” she explained on her blog. “A few minutes before I pick up one of my favorite erotic novels, [my] racing heart is perceived as very scary. But once I start reading, it’s just arousal.”

What she stumbled upon was a positive spin on “misattribution of arousal,” a psychological phenomenon that describes our mind’s tendency to look for clues around us to explain an exhilarated or agitated feeling. In a famous experiment, scientists found their research participants were likelier to pursue a woman if they met her on a rickety bridge than if they met her on a safe, stable one. The scarier bridge, so says the theory, created a fearful physiological state which the participants figured was just sexual arousal, making the woman seem more attractive. Some people, like Sarah Jane, have learned to use this response to their advantage—and a great way to do that is through erotica.

Though women’s porn consumption rates are rising, many of us are still way into erotica: 85 percent of romance readers are female, according to a 2015 Nielsen report. Theories abound about why women gravitate more to textual porn than the image-based kind: We’re said to be “less visual” and more sexually inhibited, or have lower libidos in general. But sex educator Emily Nagoski’s 2015 book Come As You Are has a better explanation: Namely, that emotional context is much more vital to women’s arousal than it is to men’s.

Nagoski writes that women get turned off more easily than men when confronted with “external circumstances and internal states such as stress, attachment, self-criticism, and disgust”—all responses we can have to visual porn, which has a tendency to objectify and shame our bodies, classify us as either “good girls” or “sluts,” or emphasize how useful we are to men over our own pleasure.

Erotica, meanwhile, provides that context we might crave: Sometimes the characters are in a loving relationship, sometimes they have a flirty rapport, other times they’re just characters we already know and love.

That might be why fan fiction—and erotic fan fiction, especially—has traditionally been such a female pursuit. A 2013 census survey of fan fiction hotbed Archive of Our Own found that 80 percent of the site’s users are women. And it goes far beyond arousal: In an industry where most successful writers, showrunners, and filmmakers are still male, fanfic can be a way for women to take back narrative power.

And fan fiction can be a great way for women to work through mental roadblocks. Ruby,* a student in her early twenties, told me that writing Harry Potter erotic fan fiction has occasionally mollified her depression. “It’s comforting that these are characters I already know and a format I’m already comfortable with,” she said about the romantic scenarios she’d craft between canon character Sirius Black and her own original female character. “I could make him the exact kind of man that I wanted, and make the protagonist the exact kind of woman I wanted to be.”

In her 2013 book Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, Anne Jamison interviews one of the most prominent writers in the Sherlock fandom, Katie Forsythe. Her much-lauded Paradox series was an effort to “write the crazies out of [her own] head,” Forsythe explains, and hints at her experiences with bipolar disorder and addiction. Her version of Sherlock Holmes is an obsessive, possessive, mercurial lunatic who is maniacally in love with his John Watson—and Forsythe says writing him this way helps her sort out her own inner chaos. “I am a nutcase, and my brain runs on multiple tracks with no off switch. I write to scrape ugly feelings off my chest,” she told Jamison. “Writing someone who’s still madder on the continuum than I am, really madder by far, seems to be good for my mental health. Which is why I write [Holmes and Watson] this way. They are little catharses wrapped in a bow.”

This cathartic aspect of both reading and writing erotica is crucial to its emotional benefits for many women. A sex blogger who goes by Livvy Libertine told me that writing erotica helped her heal from a decade-long marriage to a man who emotionally and sexually abused her, leaving her with PTSD and a whole lot of sexual guilt. She didn’t set out to ease her trauma by writing erotica but found that crafting sexy stories helped her rebuild her own sense of agency. “It was something he could not, would not, be able to take from me or use against me,” she explained. Her stories involve clear, enthusiastic, continuous consent—an element that was, sadly, missing from her own rapes, but that she can powerfully insist on in her fiction. “I have almost lost my fear of him completely, and my PTSD is more under control than it has ever been,” she told me. “I feel freer, and I finally have realized that what happened wasn't my fault.”

Erotica writer and trauma survivor Oleander Plume has experienced similar benefits from her own creative process. “There was shame associated with sex that I believed stemmed from my abuse. ‘How can I enjoy sex when it has brought so much fear and shame into my life?’” she wrote in a blog post on the subject. “Writing and reading erotica pushed me past that barrier [and] helped me reclaim my desire.”

To borrow from Emily Nagoski again, erotica helps some survivors craft a sexual context that contains fewer stressors and more pleasures. There, they can perhaps learn to enjoy sex again—both in stories and in real life.

Of course, erotica isn’t a cure-all for anxiety, depression, or the residual effects of trauma. But it’s freeing to think of it as a potential tool in an expansive toolbox that can be available to people who struggle with these issues. And in a world which shames women for their sexuality and treats their emotions as somehow unhealthy, we should try to make use of any and all of the tools available to us—even if it involves a fictional lothario’s veiny, throbbing manhood.